Wikipedia:Vandalism is pointless

Counter Vandalism Unit

Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, we are of course going to have a minority of individuals who are here just to vandalize, troll, blank, be uncivil and generally create a mess. Unfortunately for them:

Vandalism is 100% pointless!

Now this is not some sort of unspoken rule or anything, it is nothing short of a fact, allow us to explain:

Why is it so pointless?

There are several reasons it is so pointless, here are a few:

Page histories

• All prior page revisions are saved. You may think that by deleting a section of content, adding gibberish or doing whatever to the page, that we can't do anything about it.
  
• We can fix it. It may have taken you a few minutes to vandalize a page, but it takes a regular contributor just seconds to change it back. Is it really worth the effort?
  • Tools exist that revert edits very quickly and we can select a prior (clean) version of the page to restore if we choose.
• You can’t frame anyone else. At all. Not only does the page history record what edits were made to a page, but also who made those edits. On top of that, the recorded name also serves as a hyperlink straight to your user page. And if you’re thinking “Oh, I’ll just never set up a user page!”, keep in mind the links directly next to the one to your user page that also go to your message wall and contributions page. This means that even using homoglyphs (like “0” in place of “O”) in your username won’t confuse administrators. There is truly nowhere to run or to hide.

Recent changes patrol

• Special:RecentChanges shows a list of recent edits to Wikipedia. If you switch it to live mode you will see there are around 10 edits a second.
• If you click on diff then you can scan the changes made. You can then click undo to revert the edit. This takes around 10 seconds.
• 10 times 10 is 100, so 100 editors are needed to monitor recent changes. Wikipedia currently has around 48.1 million users.
• Contributors greatly outnumber vandals on a wiki as large as this one. Somebody or probably multiple people will review every single edit made and know whether or not it is vandalism. Your edit is unlikely to slip through unnoticed by our editors.
• Filters exist that can detect certain types of edits and "tag" them. These tagged edits show on "Recent changes" pages, alerting editors that the edits may be harmful. These sorts of edits get reviewed and reverted very quickly if they are in fact malicious or harmful.
• People get notified if a page on their "watchlist" gets changed and they will most likely check that edit to see exactly what was changed.

Rollback, Twinkle, Huggle, and administrators

• Rollback is an extremely powerful anti-vandalism tool. All administrators have it by default. The rollbacker right can be granted to just about any trusted editor that asks for it. In fact, as it stands, thousands of users have the right. One-click and something that may have taken you several minutes to do, is changed back in a flash. Even if your vandalism was performed over a series of consecutive multiple edits, it is no matter to a rollbacker. They can revert all your recent edits with a single action. Literally one click, and it is as if you were never there. Again, is it really worth trying?
• Any autoconfirmed registered editor can enable Twinkle, which allows vandalism to be easily reverted in a couple of clicks, or even in 1 click just like normal rollback when using some of its features.
• Huggle can be enabled for many editors and will also allow quick and easy vandalism reverts.
• There are new tools constantly being developed that are designed to more efficiently identify and combat vandalism.
• Administrators can see what is going on and there is a page where any editor may report users who constantly vandalize. So really, you are going to get blocked from editing very quickly. Then you hit the autoblock which prevents you from making another account for 24 hours or longer, so why bother?
• If you constantly make vandal socks, some users can check your IP address and block that as well. That would mean you can't contribute again until the block expires, which may take months, years or never happen at all. What is the point?

Fully automated tools

• Some bots, such as ClueBot NG, are programmed to detect and automatically revert vandalism using machine learning techniques. You are not wasting any human resources in most cases. The bot takes care of everything for us, including issuing vandalism warnings and reporting persistent vandals to administrators. ClueBot is fast too. Vandalism blatant enough to trip ClueBot's threshold will often automatically be reverted within seconds of going live.
• In addition, the Edit Filter allows administrators to set up automated filter rules, again enforced continuously without any human intervention.

Consequences

You will be blocked. Your IP address may be blocked or even your IP range if you are persistent enough.

See also

• Wikipedia:Banning policy
• Wikipedia:Blocking policy
• Wikipedia:Consequences of sock puppetry
• Wikipedia:Vandalism